Make your homeschool four days a week!
I'm in Colorado for the Women's Conference, Restoring Tradition. If you want to see my talk, which I think was surprising to many and seemingly well received — and maybe will be a chapter of a book I would like to get started on, about authentic womanhood — you can get the recording (and all the rest too!) here.
Last week I said I'd expand a bit on why your homeschooling week should only be four days. We did talk a little in the comments, but I'll explain it more here.
I recommend schooling Monday through Thursday. When you make your plans for the year, write them in that way, and leave Fridays as a day of catching up, doing some deeper housework together to get ready for a calm weekend, and meeting with friends at a playground or state park (or whatever) in the afternoon.
If you schedule every day, you'll soon feel burned out. There are days when someone (or everyone) is sick. Sometimes a lesson just takes longer, and that can feel like pressure or it can be an opportunity to, well, take your time! Why not? Well, if you don't have a pressure-valve, that extra day, you won't be able to.
It's important not to imagine school as a place where the schedule is barreling along, with high-quality learning happening every day from the minute the children walk in the door until the minute they leave, because if we all remember our days there, we know it's not true.
If you homeschooled and really don't know, go ask a teacher. Believe me, they watch videos. They take extra days to cover material that is stumping some kids. They go on field trips. They sometimes give the kids free time to do whatever they want!
And by the way, even each day is not about maximum performance! A good deal of school is spent getting from point A to point B. Since these days children aren't disciplined to respond and obey and teachers aren't allowed to punish, teachers have to build in time for coaxing, explaining, and generally dragging the kids to do the simplest things.
So at home, you are accomplishing things at a much greater rate than you think. If you look at the texts used in schools, you will see that the first few chapters are review and the last few chapters are either somewhat tangential material that doesn't need to be included or material for the following year.
If you remember how it was, you never got to those last chapters. Thinking about math books… I don't know, but we just never got there!
So relax.
You really can fit a public school day into an hour or two at home, and a public school week into four days, for sure. Homeschool has so many wonderful rabbit holes and opportunities and especially a large family has much to do; it's important to leave time for all the things.
I have a friend who worked for a landscaping company when he was younger. He told me that the owner, who was quite successful, always designated Fridays, at least the afternoons, not for the client but for his own site, where he had the men wash down the trucks, repair equipment, and tend to things that had fallen through the cracks during the week. Sometimes he had them spend a few hours on his own yard!
I thought about how important a habit that really is for all of us. We simply can't schedule every day to keep our noses at the grindstone! You'll have a calmer week, weekend, and year if you don't make Friday a full school day.
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